Grit, Grind, and Growth — 10 ‘klues’ to growing your startup

We had the pleasure of catching up with our alumni Jason Smith, CEO and Co-founder of Klue. We chatted about the process of finding a co-founder, the Amazon effect, intrapreneurship, and the everyday startup grind.

Jason Smith is the quintessential serial entrepreneur. He started his first company straight out of university which grew to 100 employees before it was acquired by TELUS. He went on to be part of many startup journeys; one failed, another grew to a few million dollars in revenue, and the third was Vision Critical, a leader in the customer intelligence space and one of Canada’s anchor technology companies. Jason helped scale Vision Critical from startup to 500+ employees as President. As Vision Critical grew, Jason watched the number of competitors increase with no effective way to keep track of them or relevant data to develop competitive strategies. This pain point inspired him to develop a solution to help companies stay ahead of competition by making better use of available data. This idea turned into his current company, Klue.

Fun fact: Between VisionCritical and Klue, Jason took a gap year to travel with his wife and kids exploring 13+ countries - including Egypt in the middle of the revolution. Curious? Click here to check out their highlight video!

About Klue

Klue helps salespeople, and the teams that enable them, leverage competitive intelligence to win more business. The platform combines information shared by co-workers with bot-collected intel from across the web and transforms it into battle cards and living dashboards of competitor activity. Put another way, Klue helps product marketers build and refresh compete materials and salespeople leverage those materials to win more deals.

Jason’s Top 3 Tips

1. Get the right co-founder

One of the main challenges early stage entrepreneurs face is finding a suitable co-founder, especially strong technical co-founders. We wanted to hear what Jason had to say about this process, considering he had to go through the co-founder recruitment process twice.

Given the technical nature and AI focus of Klue, Jason knew he needed an experienced technical co-founder. Like many others, Jason had to go through the time consuming process of searching and networking, meeting, convincing, assessing, background checking and investing in the marriage commitment that is a co-founder relationship.

“There is a huge difference between a really talented developer that you get along with and a co-founder… it comes down to trust”

Jason started down the co-founder path of with a very talented developer but called it off when trust levels and approaches to the relationship differed. It meant shelving Klue and back to the 100 coffee meeting grind to find a new co-founder. His search ultimately led him to meet, Sarathy Naicker, Klue’s CTO and co-founder, former Chief Technologist of Sophos, co-author of Perl, and developer of the world’s first anti-spam product now used by 100m people.

2. Startup growth is a step function, not a linear function

Jason views startup growth as a step function rather than a linear function using a Cliffs and Elevators analogy. The analogy suggests startups go through a set of self-imposed and external milestones that determine whether they take the elevator up to the next level in the step function or fall off the cliff.

Typical Cliff & Elevator Milestones for Venture backed Startups

• Idea — Yes it’s a good idea BUT DO YOU REALLY REALLY LOVE IT? Stop there if you can’t love working on it for ten years.
• 100 Meeting Test — Get a bunch of INSANELY SMART people to tear your idea to pieces. If your idea evolves and survives this process it will come out strong enough to face the market.
• Co-founder — Do you have the right co-founder? Complimentary skills? Trust?
• Prototype — Can you build a prototype that is good enough to get prospects and potential investors interested?
• Angel funding — Can you land angel funding with your prototype?
• Build it — Can you actually build what you pitched and start getting real client traction?
• Seed venture funding — Do you have enough traction and a large enough market to attract seed venture funding? And it goes on from there….

3. Think bigger

Canadians are nice. Everyone loves Canadians. But we also tend to be modest when it comes to entrepreneurship. We need to think bigger, set ambitious goals, target the biggest fish, and convince the brightest talent to join you on your journey. Jason encourages bigger, bolder moves from the get go, starting with getting the best possible beta customer to set the tone for your launch. In their first year, Klue had 25 beta clients that included Hootsuite and Absolute Software, and when they launched their paid version they closed more top tier companies including Dell EMC, Nike and Ceredian. That being said, it’s important not to confuse going big with going broad, you should still focus your efforts towards a niche market however, within that niche market go for the biggest clients possible.

Other words of wisdom by Jason:

Solve a real problem; an idea people are willing to pay for.

It’s about the people; who you work with matters.

Get out there; talk to clients and prospects all the time.

No assholes; hire for attitude and fit first, skills second

Hustle; be resourceful

Shortest path to B: don’t overcomplicate

Love your first 20 customers; they are your apostles

Get stuff out the door: don’t overthink it, it’ll change anyway.

Watch the full video interview for the rest

Special thank you to Sam Chan and Jason Smith for their time.